Carrel, Alexis - The aggregate

Identifier

Type of Spiritual Experience

Background

A description of the experience

it is the location in the animal's body that gives living tissues their specificity. An artery can be grafted into another body and play the role of a vein, or vice versa when it replaces a diseased part of it. There is therefore an organic plane, and living matter obeys it to such an extent that it changes its function if it is forced to live in a place other than the one for which it was originally created. I'm not fabricating anything. The Carrel surgeon's experiments establish this peremptorily. Here is what was found:

Through his technique, Dr. Carrel, an unprecedented thing, managed to patch several centimetres of destroyed abdominal aorta with a piece of peritoneum. And it holds! And the piece of peritoneum soon turns into a vascular wall! What a future for the radical cure of aneurysms!

Instead of the peritoneum, a vein can be used, for example a piece of femoral vein instead of a carotid fragment. And the circulation is just as good! And the vein turns into an artery!

For the past two years, a laboratory dog of Dr. Carrel's has been carrying, in place of an abdominal artery, a piece of popliteal artery taken from a young man whose leg had just been cut off, and this human artery works admirably in animals.

Unexpectedly, Dr. Carrel can store fragments of vessels, veins or arteries, and even other tissues in specially arranged tubes for more than ten months without affecting their vitality. We graft them and they weld together. The blood flow recovers in their blood vessels that have been empty for so long. Thus revived, they immediately adapt to the new functions imposed on them....

Finally, a fact that exceeds all expectations and that we would not believe if Professor Pozzi had not seen it himself, Dr. Carrel is exchanging limbs. There is a white and a black dog of the same size in his laboratory, each of them wearing the right rear leg of the other. None of them seems to suspect it, and the black leg of the white dog and the white leg of the black dog are as strong, as vigorous, as free of functional inferiorities as when they were still owned by their former owners[3]...